Change happens. With chronic illness, change isn’t always in the right direction. But here we are … what are we going to learn from it?
This has been an exciting fall for me. First, there is Nebraska football. I won’t ago into details, but the gist of it was that I get to see Husker football in Lincoln. By the way, if you want great Ethiopian cuisine, you can find it in Lincoln at a restaurant named “Tiru” off of N. 27th. The food and service is wonderful, it wasn’t crowded (even on game day), and I’d give it 5 stars. Try it.
I have two and a half bins of letters, notes, newspaper clippings, etc., from, by, or on my great-grandfather John Stevens (my mom’s mom’s dad). He could do anything. He farmed, he ran a newspaper (Edison Echo), and most of all he was a lawyer. In his copius leisure time he wrote stories. I have sixty or seventy stories. They are well written. It’s interesting from a cultural perspective because he conveys both the generational flavors (I mean, how old folks talk), and he gives us a Nebraska flavor (which I recognized). I’m compiling maybe 50 of his best stories. There’s a mix … not all are knee slappers. He wrote some romantic comedy, some serious (e.g., law and order) stuff, some religious stuff (even had part of his own commentaries on the Bible), some history (the N.Cherokee and Lakota Sioux fighting — that’s what my last book (Saving Arapahoe) was based on….
So fo the last 25 years of having PD, I’ve had many, many falls. The number of falls has reduced significantly when I began using the AbbVie pump in a clinical trial. I’m in my fourth year on the trial. And I love it.
But,’ I still do fall. A week ago today, I managed to trip and fall down the little 6-step stairway that we built to walk down from the garage into the backyard. I was holding my two-year-old grandson’s hand, and as soon as I realized I was falling, I knew I had to let go of his hand. He was able to remain standing.
I, however, landed face-first on the sidewalk in the backyard. At that moment, I could have been a Monty Python character groaning, “My brain hurts.”
Indeed, I couldn’t move without intense and torturous pain. My brain felt like it was going to explode. It took about 30 minutes for EMS to get there … but they did get there and took me to ER. Praise the Lord, I had no fractures or breakage of anything; I had no brain bleed; and I even had no concussion. Well, that’s debatable. it FELT like a concussion. It took a couple days for the swelling to go down so that the headache would go away.
And I had a heck of a beautiful black / deep red eye.
Oh, I also went to the dentist and had it checked out. My jaw was hurting and my lower and upper jaws weren’t lining up. When the swelling went away, the jaws were fine.
I’ve had numerous bicycle, tricyle, and other various accidents, and I sometimes would be scraped and banged up all over. But this fall down the steps onto the concrete, hitting my head, was something I haven’t experienced. I hope I never do again.
I need to remember to take one step at a time.